This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

While only one suspect assassinated Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his Wichita church on Sunday, the shooter did not act alone.

Oh sure, just one man, Scott Roeder, 51, has been arrested in connection with the fatal attack on the doctor, one of only three in the entire U.S. courageous enough to protect women's lives and rights by performing late-term abortions.

But, as the news of the murder spread online, you could see the face of the American Taliban – shall we say Christofascists instead? – who have supported those who have shot and killed abortion providers, firebombed and invaded clinics and harassed desperate women on their way in or out of doctor's offices.

The attacks have occurred both in the United States and in Canada, where, as the Star reported last week, authorities are not charging James Kopp, now doing life plus 10 in New York for the execution of Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998, despite his being "a person of interest" in the shooting of abortion providers here.

In fact, Tiller himself had already been shot in both arms in 1993. And still, he soldiered on, knowing full well that no woman wakes up in the sixth month of her pregnancy and says, "Hmmm, I have changed my mind. I don't want a baby today."

He knew that, when women came to him, it was because their lives were in danger. Or because their fetuses were so beyond any help known to medicine and science, that to carry them to term only to watch them die gasping for air within hours of delivery was simply more than they could – or should be forced – bear.

He performed acts of mercy.

And by the way, Canadian women relied on Tiller as well.

But watch Fox News' Bill O'Reilly (you'll find video on my blog), who railed against the good doctor of Wichita, calling him "Tiller the Killer" on more than two dozen programs, and you'd think every abortion is a late-term abortion, despite the fact that only 0.2 per cent per year are.

A typical statement from O'Reilly and his ilk: "In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics. It doesn't get worse than that. This is the absolute shame of America."

Go to the so-called Christian websites – where gruesome videos of cut-up babies are splattered over the home pages – and you'd think that women and their doctors were tearing little children limb from limb every time an abortion is performed.

No wonder that, since Sunday, many websites were no longer accessible because their tech types were furiously scrubbing the incitements to violence. But the Internet does not forget, and the cached pages have been preserved, revealing the hate in its entirety.

Which could explain why Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, which dogged Tiller, and on whose website Roeder posted, said yesterday, having nothing to lose: "George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches."

I have to ask, at what point does the U.S.'s constitutionally protected free "effective rhetoric" end and the incitement to violence, called "fighting words" in a 1942 Supreme Court decision, start?

Make no mistake: The systematic targeting of abortion clinics and their patients is domestic terrorism. That despite how the right, including top-ranking Republicans such as John McCain and Sarah Palin, pretend otherwise.

Just because it's carried out by white men instead of brown ones, committed in the name of Jesus instead of Allah, and all but encouraged by the right-wing hate machine online and on the air cannot mask the sick, sad truth.

These men who commit these acts, ostensibly to protect babies, really hate women. (And why is it that it's almost always men who head these anti-choice organizations, including the Church?) They hate them just as much as those brutes in far-off countries where women are forced to cover themselves from head to toe.

The result is the same: women being denied equality, independence, the right to protect their health and their families

Oh, here it's all cloaked differently. "Think of the `unborn' children." "What about the right of the fetus?" "Doesn't the baby get freedom of choice?'"

What a load. The only thing that stands between the women-haters in other lands and women-haters here are the feminist men and women who fight for women's rights.

Dr. George Tiller gave his life for that fight.

And he was more Christian – and pro-life – than the forced birthers can ever be.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com